Update. I actually got this to work. Part of my problem, I think, was the fact that the software itself kind of sucks, and doesn't even reliably communicate with the programmer under *Windows*. Testing on a Windows 98 machine, I was able to get it to work occasionally, but if I closed the software and reopened it, it wouldn't re-establish communication with the programmer. Similarly, sometimes it simply would not work at all - even in Windows.
Doing more research, it would seem that the BK 845 programmer I have is exactly the same as the TopMax programmer - which has more recent software. I downloaded that, and tried it in Windows 98... only to have it crash complaining of oleaut32.dll problems. Whatever.
So, for grins, I tried it on the same machine, under Linux. And what do you know, the stupid thing works. Once again, you have to set the OS type to Win98, but it actually does function, and communicate with the programmer, and everything works.
I had to set up the ppdev and ports keys in the registry, and changed the permissions to allow my user to talk to the parallel port, but after that, it worked just fine.
Only problem is that Wine doesn't render the window for the new programmer software very well. The buttons in the toolbar are far too wide, and they won't all fit on the screen. Running the software (on my PC at work, Windows XP) produces properly sized buttons, but in Wine, on either PC I've tried it on, the buttons just show up massive. The labels, text and icons are the same size on the buttons, they just have a bunch of blank space on all of them - and are about three times wider than they're supposed to be.
Software in question : http://www.eetools.com/downloads/ml35o.zip
Played with settings in winecfg such as allowing/not allowing window manager to decorate windows, title bars, even set a virtual desktop of 800x600. Same problem.
Also, this may be related, or not - but WindowMaker really freaks out with Wine applications quite frequently. It seems like no matter what Windows app I'm using, if I minimize it, WindowMaker crashes and restarts. Even Wine File does this.
Any ideas?
-Ian